Get the latest buzz on public relations in New Zealand and across the globe.

Menu

Digital tools for 2015

Last year I completed the PRINZ Advanced Digital Strategy course facilitated by Catherine Arrow. The course focused on developing your organisational digital strategy and the importance of aligning it with the overarching organisational strategy. We also discussed practical solutions to a variety of case studies and tested some new digital tools. Below I’ve listed my top five:

Mentionmapp takes your most recent tweets and creates a mind-map featuring the people you’ve recently tweeted at and hashtags you’ve recently used. It allows you to visually see who interacts with you most on Twitter and what their interests are – great for identifying your online community and potential new thought leaders.

Tagboard pulls together all the mentions of a hashtag across all social media and gives you data on the use of that hashtag i.e. positive/neutral/negative sentiment, posts per hour and a trending map, as well as related tags. This is good for seeing all the mentions of your hashtag in one place, visually.

Socialbakers tracks, analyses and benchmarks social profiles across a myriad of social media to produce relevant (monthly) reports on social users – see the November 2014 New Zealand Social Marketing report, which contains information on the top brands on Facebook in New Zealand.

Spike is a news tool that allows you to track stories or topics as they grow. You can filter by location and topic, time period and even rank by Facebook likes, velocity, Tweets and more. You can enter a search term to see what content is trending around the topic and combine multiple filters to get the most relevant and useful data to you. You can then save as many ‘newsrooms’ as you want, and be emailed about each one as often as you’d like.

Create a visual story about any topic – just search (you can filter by media) and drag the pictures, videos, and quotes across to your board. It’s a great visual display of your chosen topic and you can have multiple contributors. To view the full version of the example below, click here.

Human Rights Day 2014 – a storify created by the UK Foreign & Commonwealth Office.

If you are interested in attending Advanced Digital Strategy in 2015 book here.

I feel like these are great tools in the PR world and the growth of social media. Mentionmapp and tagboard looks like it would be an effective way to use twitter and I plan on checking them out. Storify also seems interesting because most people want to see a story visually instead of reading it.